From access to parity — Can the DMA secure effective interoperability for on-device AI agents? Theory and evidence from the mobile AI stack

Details

Supervisors

Johnen, Johannes

Faculty

Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales, politiques et de communication

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences économiques, orientation générale, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

enThe Digital Markets Act (DMA) was conceived before the rise of large language models (LLMS). It is therefore worth asking whether its obligations reach the new competitive bottleneck that AI agents have created on the device itself. Taking the mobile market as its focal case, this thesis asks whether Article 6(7) DMA on interoperability, with Article 6(5) DMA on self-preferencing, effectively reaches a gatekeeper’s privileged access to the on-device AI accelerator (the neural processing unit) for its own agent, or whether the obligation’s access-not-parity scope, its integrity exception, and its enforcement mode leave a hardware-layer foreclosure gap. It combines a doctrinal reading of Article 6(7) and its enforcement, a reduced-form model of foreclosure by access-quality degradation, and a case study of the Commission’s Google proceeding (Case DMA.100220) and of Apple’s June 2026 decision to withhold its rebuilt Siri from iPhones and iPads in the European Union.